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Alexandra Navratil & Raymond Taudin Chabot: Blueprints in Motion

For the specific occasion of Alexandra Navratil’s residency at IMMA, Navratil and the artist Raymond Taudin Chabot decided to collaborate and to produce a new video piece titled Blueprints in Motion.

The title of the video Blueprints in Motion is a fragment of Dziga Vertov’s text WE: Variant of a Manifesto, published in 1922 in Moscow. The text is an example of the positivist belief in the future and in technological progress as a means to liberate and equate the people. Machines, constructions and technologies are seen as a superior extension of people’s bodies.

The exhibited video presents a different reality. The modernist belief in progress has failed and most of the communist ideals seem to have disappeared. Large-scale decisions, speculation and extensive construction projects are planned and executed without involving the actual inhabitants of the area. They are reduced to mere spectators and bystanders of a spectacle transforming their surroundings. Blueprints in Motion contains parallel times within the same frame, the rationalized economical time of the construction, the expanded time of the spectators and the time of the actual camera movement.

Recent exhibitions by Navratil include The Eternal Return of Difference, 2008 at Galeria angels Barcelona, Spain and Coulisses, 2008 at Piano Nobile, Geneva. She has recently been awarded Winner of the Swiss Art Award, 2009 and Winner of the Prix Mobilière Young Art, 2009.Further work can be viewed at www.alexandranavratil.com

Recent works by Taudin Chabot have been shown at FormContent, London; Kunstverein Bregenz, Austria and Photo Museum, St. Petersburg. Other recent projects include two books, published in collaboration with Roma Publishers, Amsterdam. Further work can be viewed at www.raymondtaudinchabot.net